Most Democrats Backed by Steyer Come Up Short

WASHINGTON—Billionaire activist Tom Steyer’s drive to make climate change a winning issue in this year’s midterm election fell short as several Democratic candidates he supported lost amid the Republican sweep in Congress and state races.

NextGen Climate Action Committee, the PAC that Mr. Steyer created in 2013 to press climate change as a political issue, spent $65 million in the current election cycle, with the bulk of the money going to support four Senate races and three governor races where there was a distinction between candidates on climate and energy issues. Of that money, all but about $5.4 million came from Mr. Steyer’s own pocket.

Democrats lost in four out of the seven races Mr. Steyer supported, including the Colorado Senate race, where Democratic Sen.
Mark Udall
lost to Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, and the Florida governor’s race, where former Democratic Gov.
Charlie Crist
failed to unseat Republican Gov.
Rick Scott.

Mr. Steyer’s PAC spent nearly $17 million in Florida and more than $8.5 million in Colorado, NextGen spokesman
Bobby Whithorne
said.

Republicans painted Mr. Steyer’s campaign as a failure. But some political experts said his efforts fell short because the Democratic Party faced a tough election year, rather than because of the specific campaign he mounted.

“This was such a bad year for Democrats that a 3 of 7 record isn’t as awful as it seems,” said
Larry Sabato,
political science professor at the University of Virginia. “No one, no matter how wealthy, is going to dominate American elections. There are too many checks and balances,” he said.

NextGen’s top political strategist,
Chris Lehane,
acknowledged the “headwinds” they faced. He said Mr. Steyer didn’t waste his money and is taking a longer-term view of his efforts, which he said will ramp up even more for the 2016 presidential election cycle. Mr. Lehane cited poor voter turnout and voter focus on foreign policy and Ebola as two of the challenges that the campaign faced.

NextGen’s spending represented the bulk of the environmental community’s record spending this election cycle. Combined with the nearly $30 million the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund spent, environmental groups spent more than $90 million this cycle, which is more than five times what they spent in 2012, a presidential election year.

“It wasn’t the best night for us. We do this work not just because of one election or another election. We do this work because we care deeply about the challenge of climate change,” said
Gene Karpinski,
president of the League of Conservation Voters.

NextGen said it spent more than $11 million in Iowa, more than $7 million in Michigan, more than $2 million in Maine, more than $3.8 million in New Hampshire and $1.4 million in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Steyer, who became wealthy as founder of Farallon Capital Management, a California-based, hedge-fund company, left the private sector in 2013 to focus on politics and philanthropy. He has emerged as the Democratic Party’s closest counterpart to the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, who have funded many conservative causes, such as the tea-party group Americans for Prosperity.

Mr. Steyer did succeed somewhat in injecting climate change in political debate, even though the issue continues to rank low as a voter priority.

In an October New Hampshire debate, Mr. Brown blamed “a combination of man-made and natural” causes for climate change, marking a shift since an August debate when he replied “no” when asked if there was scientific evidence of a human role in global warming. In Colorado, Mr. Gardner, who stood amid wind-farm towers in one of his television ads, said recently “there is no doubt that pollution contributes to the climate changing.”